Antebellum Posthuman Is a Thought-Provoking and Timely Contribution to The

AMERICAN STUDIES | LITERATURE Ellis “Antebellum Posthuman is a thought-provoking and timely contribution to the recent explosion of work on the desirability of moving beyond the ‘human’ Posthuman Antebellum as analytic framework or political horizon. Ellis’s consideration of Douglass, Thoreau, and Whitman uncovers posthumanism’s Romantic unconscious, challenging the contemporary faith in political progressiveness of the posthuman turn. Arguing for a renewed engagement with matter, Antebellum Posthuman persuasively models a close critical attentiveness that does not assume in advance what the outcome of that engagement will be.” —Dana Luciano, Georgetown University rom the eighteenth-century abolitionist motto “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” to the civil rights–era declaration “I AM a Man,” antiracism has engaged in a struggle for the recognition of black humanity. It has done so, however, even as the very definition of the human has been called into question by the biological sciences. While this conflict between race and materiality in the F mid–nineteenth century liberal humanism and biological materialism animates debates in posthumanism and critical race studies today, Antebellum Posthuman argues that it first emerged as a key question in the antebellum era. In a moment in which the authority of science was increasingly invoked to defend slavery and other racist policies, abolitionist arguments underwent a profound shift, producing a new, materialist strain of antislavery. Engaging the works of Douglass, Thoreau, Whitman, and Dickinson, Cristin Ellis identifies and traces the emergence of an antislavery materialism in mid-nineteenth-century American literature, placing race at the center of the history of posthumanist thought. Turning to contemporary debates now un- folding between posthumanist and critical race theorists, Ellis demonstrates how this antebellum posthumanism highlights the difficulty of reconciling materialist ontologies of the human with the project of social justice. Antebellum Posthuman CRISTIN ELLIS is Assistant Professor of English at the University of race and materiality in the Mississippi. mid–nineteenth century FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS New York www.fordhampress.com Fordham Cristin Ellis Cover image: Antiheroe No. 45 by Susana Blasco (www.susanablasco.com). Cover design by Ashley Muehlbauer Ellis_pbk.indd 1 10/25/2017 9:14:01 PM A ntebellum P osthuman 153-71159_ch00_3P.indd 1 11/1/17 11:56 AM 153-71159_ch00_3P.indd 2 11/1/17 11:56 AM Antebellum Posthuman Race and Materiality in the Mid– Nineteenth Century Cristin Ellis fordham university press New York 2018 153-71159_ch00_3P.indd 3 11/1/17 11:56 AM Copyright © 2018 Fordham University Press ThisAll work rights is licensed reserved. under No parta Creative of this Commons publication Attribution- may be NonCommercial-NoDerivativesreproduced, stored in a retrieval 4.0system, International or transmitted License. in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy,Copyright recording, © 2018 Fordhamor any other— University except Press for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission All rights reserved.of No the part publisher. of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in Fordhamany form University or by any Pressmeans— has electronic,no responsibility mechanical, for the perphotocopy, sistence or accuracy recording, of orURLs any other—for external except or forthird- brief party quotationsInternet websites in printed referred reviews, to in withoutthis publication the prior and permission does not guarantee that any ofcontent the publisher. on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the perFordham sistence orUniversity accuracy Pressof URLs also for publishes external its or books third- in party a varietyInternet of websites electronic referred formats. to in Some this publication content that and appears does not in guaranteeprint may that not any be content available on insuch electronic websites books. is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Visit us online at www.fordhampress . com. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a varietyLibrary of electronic of Congress formats. Cataloging- Some content in- Publication that appears Data in printavailable may not online be available at https:// in catalogelectronic . loc .books. gov. VisitPrinted us online in the at United www.fordhampress States of Amer . com. i ca 20 19 18 54 3 2 1 Library of CongressFirst Cataloging- edition in- Publication Data available online at https:// catalog . loc . gov. Printed in the United States of Amer i ca 20 19 18 54 3 2 1 First edition 153-71159_ch00_3P.indd 4 11/1/17 11:56 AM 153-71159_ch00_3P.indd 4 11/1/17 11:56 AM contents Introduction. Beyond Recognition: The Prob lem of Antebellum Embodiment 1 1. Douglass’s Animals: Racial Science and the Prob lem of Human Equality 23 2. Thoreau’s Seeds: Evolution and the Prob lem of Human Agency 61 3. Whitman’s Cosmic Body: Bioelectricity and the Prob lem of Human Meaning 96 4. Posthumanism and the Prob lem of Social Justice: Race and Materiality in the Twenty- First Century 135 Coda. After Romantic Posthumanism 161 Acknowl edgments 171 Notes 173 Works Cited 207 Index 223 153-71159_ch00_3P.indd 5 11/1/17 11:56 AM 153-71159_ch00_3P.indd 6 11/1/17 11:56 AM A ntebellum P osthuman 153-71159_ch00_3P.indd 7 11/1/17 11:56 AM 153-71159_ch00_3P.indd 8 11/1/17 11:56 AM Introduction Beyond Recognition: The Prob lem of Antebellum Embodiment “Am I not a man and a brother?” the eighteenth- century abolitionist motto demands. This question is meant to be rhetorical—to indict a blindness to one’s fellow human so obscene that today, as Hortense Spillers notes, it “might be denied, point blank, as a possibility for anyone, except that we know it happened.”1 Indeed, Anglo- American abolitionists regularly diag- nosed slavery as the product of a monumental failure—or deliberate refusal—to recognize the humanity of enslaved persons, and their rhe toric survives today in the commonplace assertion that slavery and racism are practices that operate by dehumanization. But while, as the famous abolitionist motto suggests, the “question” of Black humanity was undeniably on the line in the debate over slavery, this focus on recognition overlooks the full scope of the strug gle that was pitched on the battleground of the Black body in the antebellum United States.2 In this book, I argue that the ideological strug gle over slavery in antebellum Amer i ca was one that contested not just the constituency of humanity (who qualifies?) but also the meaning of “thehuman” as such. That is, I suggest that to understand the true stakes of the fight for recognition— and of the ferocity with which that recognition was denied—we must be 1 153-71159_ch01_3P.indd 1 11/1/17 11:57 AM 2 Introduction alert to the fact that the antebellum debate over Black humanity unfolded at a time when the definition of “ human” being was in flux, destabilized by the rise of a newly empirical episteme. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, Western culture had, for centuries, defined human being by contrast to its material body, identifying the mark of humanity in mankind’s supposedly transcendent freedom from material causality— a moral autonomy guaranteed by the uniquely ensouled or rational nature of the human. Indeed, in the late eigh teenth century, this faith in humanity’s inherent autonomy from nature fueled demo cratic revolutions in the United States, France, and Haiti by underwriting popu lar appeals to mankind’s univer- sal right to freedom. As Michel Foucault argues, however, in this same late eighteenth- century moment a very dif fer ent conception of human being was also beginning to take shape and transform this Western episteme of “Man.”3 As Foucault explains, thanks to a host of newly emerging fields of knowledge dedicated to the empirical study of human life (fields such as natu ral history, biology, ethnology, demography, po liti cal economy, pub- lic health, and statistics), “Western man was gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life, and individual and collective welfare.”4 In contrast to the humanisms that preceded it, then, this new empirical episteme proposed to define human being by physical traits— identifying human thought and action with embodied pro cesses rather than by freedom from such material forces. In the wake of this epistemic shift, Fou- cault writes, “the human being begins to exist within his organism, inside the shell of his head.”5 The late eigh teenth century thus marks the onset of a new volatility in the Western conception of the human. Just as demo- cratic revolutions began to enshrine the princi ples of liberal humanism, promising to extend rational subjecthood to all man- (and possibly woman-) kind, the burgeoning of empirical discourse was proliferating a new episteme that threw humanity’s rational freedom into question. Of course, the rough timeline I have just sketched indicates that this epistemic upheaval would have been already well under way by the mid– nineteenth century, the period on which this book focuses. Indeed, as studies by Jonathan Kramnick, Alan Richardson, and Justine Murison demonstrate, materialist discourses of mind circulated widely across a range of philosophical, literary, and popu lar outlets in eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century Anglo- American culture.6 But although the queasy co- existence of liberal and biological epistemes was therefore no longer news in the antebellum era, this study proposes that the antebellum moment in Amer i ca nonetheless marks an impor tant point of inflection in the ongo- 153-71159_ch01_3P.indd 2 11/1/17 11:57 AM Introduction 3 ing rearticulation of “the human.” In these years, the intensifying debate over U.S.

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